


Terms of Endearment

by PepperF



Series: My Lady Tongue [2]
Category: Community (TV)
Genre: F/M, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-14
Updated: 2015-07-14
Packaged: 2018-04-09 08:52:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4342046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PepperF/pseuds/PepperF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why Annie keeps a list of insults about Jeff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Terms of Endearment

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little ficlet for Bethany, because she's been working her fingers to the bone betaing mine (and everyone's!) fics, so I wanted to give her something back. :)
> 
> Huge thanks to thebaddestwolf for checking this one over! :D

She starts writing them down during study group one day, when Jeff has set them all at odds again, purely for his own amusement. She _hates_ when he does that, but she's trying to remain calm, to not listen to the increasingly heated arguments going on around the table, because she's told them, time and time again, that they need to knuckle down and study for the test tomorrow. If they're going to ignore her advice _again_ , well, she's not going to let her own grades suffer. But the words need to come out somewhere, so she starts a new page, and writes, in perfect copperplate: "You selfish, pointy-faced waster of other people's time." It's actually quite satisfying to see it written down, and she finds herself smirking quietly at the paper when she's done. Then she schools her face into sternness, in case anyone is looking, turns back to her notes, and tries to study.

She adds to it the following day, when Jeff gets an A on his test simply by arguing the professor into semantic knots about what exactly defines an "assignment." He doesn't deserve it, but he still gets it! She's so mad that she comes up with a couple of beautiful insults on the spot, but she's in class so she can't say them out loud, so she jots them down underneath the first one.

After that, it becomes something of a hobby. She does use a few of them – it's not an entirely impractical exercise – and it's very satisfying to have the right words to hand, so she keeps updating the Jeff Winger Insult List, crossing off any that she's actually dealt. She always likes to be prepared.

For a while in their second year she carries it around in her purse, neatly folded. But that proves too dangerous, and after one close encounter when she almost hands it over to Troy along with the library timetable, she puts it back in her folder, in a section that she knows no one will go through because it's labelled "Extra Credit Assignments."

When they find out that he's been sleeping with Britta for the last few months, she goes home that night and sits down on her bed to write an entire diatribe. But she stares at the list for ten minutes, while the neon lights outside her bedroom flash on and off, and the PA system from the store downstairs announces a special on strap-ons – and finally she unsnaps the ring binder, takes out the page, crumples it up into a ball, and hurls it across the room. 

It stays in the corner for a week, and she resolutely pretends not to see it. But then he makes her mad again, and she comes up with such a good retort, and being truly angry with him doesn't seem so important because Shirley just had an _actual baby today_ , so she picks it up and smooths it out and adds in the new entry. She slots the page back into her folder with a resigned sigh. Gel ink doesn't run, so if there had been a couple of angry, humiliated tears on there, it's impossible to tell.

Updates become more and more infrequent in their third year, and it's left untouched during their fourth and fifth years, languishing in a folder on her shelf at home. But something about their sixth year makes her nostalgic – maybe because they've lost so many people that she's clinging more tightly to the ones she has left – so when she comes across it again, it makes her smile, a lot of the pain behind the words forgotten or forgiven. She tucks it into a new folder, and it comes with her to DC. 

On a day when she's feeling like the stupidest, most backwards hick in the entire metropolitan area, she takes it out and adds two new lines, because he's not there, and she just misses this: she misses arguing with him and getting mad at him and realizing that she's already forgiven him even though he doesn't deserve it, and making him pay anyway because there's a tiny, evil corner of her soul that loves to see him squirm, and she just... she misses him.

She calls him later that night. "Hey there, G-woman," he says. She's always loved hearing his voice on the phone – there's something so intimate about having it so close to her ear, knowing it's directed at her and her alone. She thinks about reading off the entire list to him, and wonders how he'd react.

Instead, she just smiles. "Hi, Jeff."


End file.
